Video conferencing provides real-time, face-to-face interactions between people from distributed geographic locations and has become increasingly popular as a way to reduce travel expenses and enhance collaboration. Conventional video conferencing systems often use a centralized multipoint conferencing unit (MCU) to couple communication equipment at various conference sites. The MCU combines video, audio, and data streams from multiple endpoints into a single, multiple location, interactive session. Video conferencing systems developed by different suppliers often do not interoperate very well due to signaling and format mismatches between different endpoints.
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